Throughout the second half of the 1990s, a wave of articles published in the mainstream US media declared, with jolting regularity, the end of feminism. By then, the movement had grown used to obituaries. A June 1998 Time cover featured the black-and-white disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem alongside the fictional character Ally McBeal, the lone colorized figure. Beneath her in bold red type the question: “Is feminism dead?”
Attempts to reinvigorate the movement were not treated favorably. “After a while,” a 1998 New York Times review of Phyllis Chesler’s Letters to a Young Feminist opens, “all of these books that aim to jump-start the feminist movement get a little depressing. Not because they don’t contain worthwhile information or advice, but because young women these days, as often as not, believe that they need feminism like fish need bicycles.”
For her part, Chesler wrote in a 2006 article that “feminists have failed their own ideals.” She took consolation, however, in the fact that the movement’s ideals had found a new use, mobilizing support for the “liberation” of women in Islamic parts of the world as an adjunct to imperialist wars in the Middle East.
Obituaries for feminism in the late 1990s and the early 2000s were clearly signs that the energy that had animated the movement in the 1960s and ’70s — and the so-called “third wave” that followed it — had petered out. Like every feminist upsurge before it — in the 1790s, 1840s and 1900s — the women’s movement of the late 1960s and ’70s was part of a wider constellation of political struggles that contributed to its emergence and shaped its demands. It initiated discussions among women of all classes and…
Auteur: Jess Cotton
